A few months after his Justice and Development Party or AKP won Turkey’s general elections in 2011, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on his fellow citizens to confront the past.  In the years that followed several prominent sites of state sponsored violence targeting ethnic and religious minorities and former political opponents of the…

Through her research on Syria, SOAS, University of London Professor Salwa Ismail argues that violence needs to be understood as a deliberate method of rule.  Author of The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria, Ismail cautions us not to reduce regimes that perpetrate heinous human rights violations to despotic, backward, cultures of…

In October 1967 Nigerian federal troops slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians in the town of Asaba.  Elizabeth Bird, anthropologist and Professor Emerita at the University of South Florida, argues that the Asaba massacre wasn’t just one of the many atrocities committed during the Nigerian Civil War.  It was a pivotal event that prolonged a conflict…

In Memory and Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda, Tim Longman argues that the memory of the genocide has been instrumentalized by the long-ruling Rwandan Patriot Front or RPF.  By casting itself as the selfless liberator of the Tusti minority, the RPF has used the genocide to mask its own crimes, abuses of power, and political ambitions. …

The bones of the tens of thousands of victims of the Franco regime buried in mass graves throughout Spain are now telling their stories.  Nicole Iturriaga, author of Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain’s Past, chronicles the rise of the international forensics human rights movement and how it is helping to shatter the…

Over a decade of civil war tore apart the tiny Central American nation of El Salvador.  Throughout the 1980s the United States poured billions of dollars into the conflict to stop the spread of communism in Central America.  Beyond the massive loss of life and even greater human displacement, deathsquads and special military units massacred,…

Soviet leaders struggled to confront the memory of the repressions on two occasions.  First, in the period immediately following the death of Stalin, and second, three decades later, in the final years of the Soviet Union.  In Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR, Kathleen Smith argues that on both occupations…

Soviet leaders struggled to confront the memory of the repressions on two occasions.  First, in the period immediately following the death of Stalin, and second, three decades later, in the final years of the Soviet Union.  In Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR, Kathleen Smith argues that on both occupations…

The militarism we see in Russia today has much to do with the rehabilitation of the memory of Stalin.  The Stalin of the Great Terror, mass famine, and deportations has been recast as an unfortunate but necessary prelude to the victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriot War.  In Bringing Stalin Back In: Memory…

With the Communist victory in China in 1949 nearly one million civil war refugees flooded into Taiwan—the largest out migration from China in the modern era.  Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, author of The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan, helps us understand the relationship between trauma and memory in new ways. …